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Posts published by Seth Kugel

Starting this week, the Frugal Traveler column is changing its format — though you’ll barely notice the difference. This blog will no longer be updated, but the column will continue as articles — the same sort you see across nytimes.com. Photos will be more prominent and you’ll still be able to share your thoughts and advice. And you’ll be able to scroll through links to the current and archived articles just as you can now by going to the Frugal Traveler topic page. Change your bookmarks from the page you are on now to to the column page — and watch nytimes.com/travel for weekly Frugal columns. And, as always, you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook.

Strandbad Wannsee, a recently restored beach complex.Credit Seth Kugel for The New York Times

Berlin might be a young, vibrant, creative city, but during the long, cold dark winter all that youth and vibrancy and creativity is cooped up indoors. This winter was particularly long and cold: average March temperatures were below freezing and it snowed on Good Friday.

That’s why, when the warm weather finally arrives, the entire city collectively bursts out the door, strips down to the minimum appropriate clothing and heads to the vast collection of parks, outdoor cafes and riverfront clubs.

Indoor Berlin is already cheap by European standards, but outdoor Berlin is cheaper — and quite often free. So during a mid-May visit I spent as much time outside as possible, catching the transition from gloomy to glorious and witnessing the emergence from hibernation of a populace that probably vies with Scandinavians as the pastiest in the world. Here are my top suggestions for a sunny day out in the city. Prepare for company.

Shortly after landing in Barcelona earlier this month, I met up for lunch with a friend of a friend, who asked what I wanted to eat. Not in town to write about food and not feeling particularly contrarian, I said what I’d guess many travelers to Spain would say: “Tapas.” He took me to Ciudad Condal, a spot on the Rambla de Catalunya long ago flooded by tourists but still good enough to attract locals ready to wade around them.

Behind the long bar was a feast: trays loaded with Iberian ham and chorizo and octopus and razor clams. Normally, in this kind of situation my mouth would water and my desire to gorge would trump all other brain function, including empathy. But this time, for some reason (jet lag?), my mind turned to others. “What a nightmare this would be for my vegetarian friends,” I thought.

And so I spontaneously decided to spend my four days in town as a vegetarian. More problematically, a tapas-loving vegetarian in this pig-and-shellfish crazy city, is a bit like a rock fanatic who won’t listen to guitars.

For the purposes of my meat-defying efforts, I defined tapas broadly to include montaditos (mounted on bread), Basque pintxos (skewered with a toothpick) and platillos, another common item on Barcelona menus, which literally mean “small plates.” (That’s how we often translate tapas into English, anyway.) I also decided to add Argentine-style empanadas, which are sold across the city and would be a crime for vegetarians to ignore.

I can summarize the difficulty involved in this decision in the blank stare I got when I told the bartender at Cervecería Catalana that I didn’t eat meat or fish. I’d guess vegetarians know it well, and vegans better — something between “Well, then what are you doing here?” and “Are you even a human being?” I settled for a small plate of pasta that the bill categorized as “rice.”

Others, though, were more sympathetic, offering the obvious patatas bravas (potatoes with a spicy sauce, usually tomato-based and sometimes spiked with paprika and chilies), and tortillas (Spanish omelets, which for some reason I despise). Quite often I’d spot an otherwise gorgeous eggplant or cheese or sun-dried tomato creation, only to realize on closer inspection that it had been sullied by an artful ribbon of anchovy. At the Vermuteria del Tano, one of Barceona’s traditional (and newly chic) vermouth bars, a nice woman stared at the clams before her, then speared a tart pickle, an olive, a bit of red pepper and cocktail onions on a toothpick and handed it over. It wasn’t good, but I was actually there for the house vermouth, which will remain vegetarian until a trendy entrepreneur decides to infuse it with bacon.

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The scene at Gasterea, a spot that offers multiple options for vegetarians.Credit Seth Kugel

On to the highlights – and, luckily, there were quite a few. Another friend of a friend joined me at her favorite spot in the Gràcia neighborhood, an L-shaped bar called Gasterea, assuring me it was both reasonably priced and that there were plenty of vegetarian choices. I started in on the cold choices (1 euro, about $1.28, each), displayed pintxo-style on the counter: thin crispy eggplant slices with a scoop of creamy cheese pinned on with toothpicks, for example. But my favorites were the hot pintxos (1.90 euros) and cazuelitas, tapas-size “little pots” of goodies (2.65 euros): artichoke tempura with romesco sauce, the red pepper and nut-based sauce native to Catalonia. A small portion of mushroom risotto. Potatoes, presented not in bravas style but romescadas, like the artichokes. Seriously, how hard was that, I thought.

Some are unlucky in love, others in business. I am unlucky in calendars. Wherever I travel, local holidays materialize from thin air – shutting down attractions, slowing down public transport and sending the locals fleeing to country homes.

The latest unwanted holiday was in Toulouse. I planned a quick trip from Barcelona (three hours by train, six by bus), allotting 75 euros ($95.35 at $1.27 to the euro) to spend over 24 hours in France’s fourth-biggest city. Toulouse looks like a tourist haven – churches, museums, a tangle of medieval streets – but the hordes are actually more likely to be university students, probably a bit rowdier but otherwise more agreeable company.

I booked a “single room without window” in the Hotel des Ambassadeurs for 40 euros, via its Web site. That left 35 euros for a day in a relatively cheap city: entry to Les Abattoirs, the well-regarded modern art museum, is only 7 euros; Toulouse’s bike-sharing system costs 1.50 euros for 30 minutes (you are charged slightly more if you keep a single bike for more time, or you can switch bikes); and many of its nicer restaurants offer “plans du midi,” weekday lunch specials often for half the price of the dinner prix fixe. For dinner, I’d stock up on bread, local sausage and cheese at one of the city’s celebrated markets.

Alas, the only full days I could spare were last Wednesday or Thursday — the same days the French were to celebrate V-E Day and the Feast of the Ascension. (Good days for Europe and Jesus, bad days for me.) Many attractions closed and plans du midi vanished, if the restaurants stayed open at all.

But by now I know the routine: briefly curse your luck, then regroup. Restructure with what’s left, be flexible — and see the bright side: although streets are emptier, residents who stick around are at leisure, perhaps with more time to engage.

Mosey is one of a set of new sites trying to solve common travel issues.Credit

Ah, the problems budget travelers used to have. Hours on the phone with the airlines trying to pin down the cheapest fare. A bargain B&B that looked great in the brochure – if only there were a way to access feedback from previous guests. I wish there was a way to tell the world in 140 characters or less that I made it to the top of this Mayan temple!

How quaint. But there are still plenty of problems out there, just waiting to ensnare the traveler. Below are five, along with relatively new Web sites that are trying to solve them. Note: “trying.” None of them work perfectly and some have a long way to go before they become household names. But they all get an A for ingenuity.

1) Business travelers on expense accounts pay the same airfares as penny-pinching leisure travelers.

It’s that old economics problem: one group of consumers would pay more than another – if only companies could create separate markets. Airlines have made attempts (by creating business class, for example), but for the most part, business and leisure travelers are lumped together. The booking site GetGoing has a clever solution for flexible travelers called “Pick Two, Get One.” It is similar to a normal booking site, with one major catch: customers must select two flights – to different cities – and reserve with a credit card before finding out where they’re heading. The idea is that business travelers, presumably with appointments scheduled, can’t leave to chance whether they’ll be landing in Istanbul or Beijing.

Of course, not every leisure traveler can either, but for the more flexible ones, the savings are significant. To test it, I entered dates for a weeklong European getaway from New York in June. Given a choice of 20 major cities, I picked Venice and Athens, and for each got a long list of flight options and prices, with airline names hidden. (I could have also chosen more proximate destinations, like Barcelona versus Madrid or Frankfurt versus Berlin.) Ruling out flights with too-long layovers, I picked the cheapest options left: Athens for $1,114 and Venice for $1,166. (Those prices were about 15 percent less than what I found doing the same search for each city on Kayak.com.) I put down my (fake) credit card information and soon got the result: Athens, on Delta, for $213 less than the best Kayak price for a similar flight. Pretty impressive.

2) You have a day in Paris (or Seattle or Bangkok), but don’t have the time or patience to piece together a sensible itinerary from the standard sources.

Mosey lets you browse itineraries, walking tours, favorites lists and more created by fellow users. It’s not the first site ever to let travelers share tips, of course, but the format is compellingly concise, attractive and useful. At their best, these “Moseys” provide step-by-step agendas accompanied by photos and a map with all locations already pinpointed. The site is new, and the entries are still quite hit-or-miss. But when I plugged in São Paulo (the city I know best, aside from New York), I got a daylong itinerary I thought was pretty darn good. That said, the site is far from ready for prime time: it needs more content (get to work, readers) and some way to rank them by quality and filter them by length and type (get to work, Mosey).

A farmer in the Guairá region of Paraguay.Credit Seth Kugel for The New York Times

The priest faltered a bit as he climbed the stairs to the museum, housed in an attic above a church in Itapé, Paraguay, a town founded as a Franciscan mission in 1672. My guide and I had roused him from his siesta by clapping our hands repeatedly — the Paraguayan equivalent of a knock on the door. Fumbling with multiple locks and a ring of too many keys, he finally got the doors open and led us through the neatly displayed, modest treasures. I had to read the signs; his eyesight wasn’t up to the task: A 1752 wooden figure of St. Bonaventure, arms outstretched. Nineteenth-century baptismal documents. Metal meal containers from the Chaco War against Bolivia in the 1930s. Then he stopped before a simple black frock hanging from a wooden beam. “First cassock of Father Severiano Nelson Vega,” I read, “blessed by the Monsignor on March 19, 1958.”

“Do you know him?” he asked me in Spanish, with a sudden sparkle in his eyes. Of course I did: he was standing in front of me, 55 years later.Read more…

Visitors to Iguazú Falls, the 1.7-mile-long snaking series of waterfalls that is South America’s chaotic response to buttoned-down Niagara, have three choices: one, the Brazilian side (where it’s spelled Iguaçu), known for its panoramic views of the falls; or two, the Argentine side, with its pathways winding above, below and all but straight through the tumbling cascades.

I went with option three: the Paraguayan side.

Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, just across the Paraná River from Brazil and about two miles from Argentina, does not have many tourist amenities, but it does offer its own form of chaos that is to commerce what the falls are to nature: a free-for-all tax-exempt shopping zone where yellow moto-taxis and exhaust-belching buses weave around throngs of border-crossing shoppers buying knockoff Gap sweat shirts, deflated soccer balls, underpriced appliances and just about everything else under the sun. (And, for the shadier transactions the city is known for, under the moon.)

Roasting a chipa caburé, a type of cake, in a tatakua, or traditional oven.Credit Seth Kugel

Cooking a chipa caburé in a tatakua is surprisingly like roasting a marshmallow in a campfire. After wrapping dough around a stick, you place it just barely inside the edge of the domed brick oven and rotate it slowly. Get too close to the wood fire and the exterior burns; rotate it just enough and it browns beautifully as the inside cooks through, ready to be slid off the stick and eaten hot.

I roasted my first ever chipa caburé – a corn, cheese and manioc starch cake the size of a corn dog with a doughnut hole where the dog would be – on a recent Saturday in the home of María Jacinta Leguizamón. Doña Jacinta, as she is known, lives in Asunción, the rarely visited capital of the rarely visited (and landlocked) country of Paraguay. On weekends she runs an informal prepared-foods service out of her humble home for the Loma San Jerónimo neighborhood, selling traditional foods like chicharo huiti (pork meat coated in corn meal) and sopa paraguaya, a tender cornbread. Nearby were the tatakua, a couple of gobbling turkeys and a slew of family members. “She’s anti-commercial,” her daughter-in-law, Zunilda Arce, a pediatrician, told me. “She does it the way you’re supposed to do it.”

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Food prepared at the home of María Jacinta Leguizamón in Asunción.Credit Seth Kugel

I was not there by accident: Loma San Jerónimo is the site of a nascent project by Paraguay’s tourism ministry and local residents to promote the neighborhood, which somehow escaped the grid system that characterizes downtown Asunción, all but eliminating vehicular traffic and making its alleyways and passages perfect for kids to play and visitors to wander. Houses have been painted bright and inviting colors, cute signs put up and a weekend street market organized. (See their Facebook page or e-mail lomasanjeronimo@gmail.com for more information.)

Cuzco and Rio de Janeiro need not fear: Asunción, a city of about 500,000, is not poised to become the next tourism capital of South America. But it is a fascinating window into Paraguayan history and culture. Over the last 150 years, the country has been beaten up by two punishing wars and one wicked dictatorship, but has emerged with a fierce and peculiar independent spirit represented by (among other things) a national indigenous language — Guaraní — that just about everyone mixes liberally with Spanish. The city (and country) make for an interesting side trip from Buenos Aires or Iguazú Falls — or, though it would be a bold call, a trip of its own for travelers who prefer their destinations off-beat, unexplored, mighty friendly and shockingly inexpensive. Asunción was a bargain in just about every way imaginable (except for the $160 entry visa for Americans); for starters, its buses cost 2,000 guaraníes, or 50 cents at 4,000 guaraníes to the dollar, and get you just about anywhere.

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At Bartholu’s, sandwiches go for less than $5, and diners can customize them with a long row of toppings.Credit Seth Kugel

But it is not a journey of the obvious. A good orientation involves reading a little history – you know, history, the part of the guidebook you usually skip past – and soaking up two powerful museums that go a long way to explaining Paraguayan identity.

The best travel moments are almost always unplanned. But going off-script often requires risking the most valuable commodity a traveler has: time. We need to give up a sure thing (a major museum, a picturesque waterfall, a buzzed-about bistro) for the unknown (turning down a dirt road, approaching a stranger, stepping through a door).

I travel with a more unwieldy to-do list than most, one that I gather from friends, colleagues, readers, Twitter followers, Web research, travel apps, guidebooks, etc. There’s invariably more on my agenda than I could possibly hope to accomplish.

Yet when someone mentions a place I’ve been to, even if was months or years earlier, without fail the first image my brain churns up — the cover picture on the photo album in my head — doesn’t come from that list. It’s something I saw or someplace I went or someone I met after I summoned the courage to abandon my plans.

The truth is, I wish I did that more often; I often chicken out. But when I do improvise, something amazing always happens. At least, that’s the way it seems. In reality, I’m sure I’ve turned down a lot of dirt roads that led to nowhere and have been blown off by many strangers. Selective memory, I guess.

Luckily, sometimes there’s a real photo to match my memories of a risk that paid off. Here is a selection. Share your off-the-itinerary stories in the comments section below.

Clockwise from top left: Simco’s hot dog stand, a trolley that runs to Mattapan, pizza and wine at Galleria Umberto, the Granary Burying Ground and the Institute of Contemporary Art.Credit Seth Kugel for The New York Times; Jodi Hilton for The New York Times (art institute)

Philadelphia might claim Benjamin Franklin as its own, but I can think of two ways he’s more closely tied to Boston. First, he grew up there. Second, I just spent a weekend in Boston for the value of the bill that bears his portrait.

For the latest in my series of $100 weekends, I darted from fancy food trucks to old-school pizza joints, took in a morning church service and an evening of neighborhood storytelling, held the Freedom Trail true to its first syllable and connected all the dots via the early-to-bed transit system known as the T. (There’s even an upside to that: in a city where the subway nods off shortly after midnight, entertainment budgets shrink accordingly.)

Even the strictest of budget should allow for occasional splurges: a modest hotel room after a string of hostel bunks; a just-this-once late-night cab; a beer upgrade from P.B.R. to I.P.A. But some luxuries never enter the frugal equation. Take, for example, the restaurant tasting menu — those drawn-out dinners of 8 or 10 or 25 courses, exquisitely designed (and sometimes served) by the chef. Or so I’ve heard.

On my trip to South China this past winter, I finally found a tasting menu I could afford. It took some D.I.Y. initiative, but at a spot called Hubu Alley in Wuhan, I indulged in an eight-course meal that was a culinary tour of Hubei province. And all for just over $8 (52.5 renminbi, or $8.39 at 6.14 renminbi to the dollar, to be exact). A dollar a course? No tax, no tip? Beat that, Le Bernardin.

Hubu Alley isn’t a restaurant – it’s a T-shaped pedestrian area on the east side of the Yangtze, famed for the breakfast dishes sold by dozens of vendors from street carts and stalls. And designing my tasting menu could not have been more straightforward: I simply watched what other people were eating and followed suit.

As we drove down the mountain from Lao Jun Dong, a Taoist temple perched above the smoggy mega-city of Chongqing, I tried to describe to YangYang, my host and a local magazine editor, the kind of restaurant where I wanted to eat that Sunday evening.

It had to be cheap, have no English menu, perhaps in a run-down neighborhood and serve local dishes spiced for local tastes.

“I know some places,” she said. “But they are unsuitable for tourists.”

“Yes!” I shouted. “Perfect! Take me to the place most unsuitable for tourists.”

A few hours later we were sitting at a sidewalk table, drinking local Shancheng beer from bowls, our hands in plastic gloves as we used toothpicks to extract snails from their shells after digging them out from under an avalanche of Sichuan peppers. The place – to me a restaurant, to her a street vendor – was Du Lao Wu, on Jianking Road. The menu, of course, was only in Chinese, so I had told YangYang just to order “whatever is most unsuitable for tourists.” That included the snails (20 renminbi, or about $3.25 at 6.15 renminbi to the dollar), as well as crawfish in a similarly messy and difficult-to-eat format (38 renminbi), as well as a salad of yuxiang cao, which means “fishy-smell herb” and is accurately named. YangYang had come through.

I very rarely reveal my identity as a travel writer while on the road, but YangYang, who had been hosting me for free through Couchsurfing.org, had shown such generosity – inviting me to both her magazine’s Chinese New Year party and a lavish dinner with some friends (presenting me at both as a professor of Latin American Studies, my impromptu cover) – that I decided to make a calculated exception.

Toward the end of my trip up the Yangtze, I had been planning to move on to Chengdu, the more tourist-friendly capital of neighboring Sichuan province. But I had taken a liking to Chongqing and decided to ask YangYang – whose real name is Jiang Yu – if she would use her expertise – her magazine’s English name was “City Weekly” – to show me an insider’s version of the city.

A wedding in the Indian state of Rajasthan in 2009. Would an invitation have helped the country's contention for "most friendly"?Credit Keith Bedford for The New York Times

Which country has the world’s friendliest people?

It’s a preposterous question for many reasons. Yet writers, guidebooks and travelers can’t seem to stop asking it. Admit it, you’ve returned from a place and declared to your friends that its people have got to be the friendliest (or nicest! or most wonderful!) people on the planet. I certainly have.

But today I declare I never will again, and I ask you to join me.

It’s not because such judgments are wild generalizations of culturally complex places, nor because most travelers (including me) have been too few of the world’s countries to speak authoritatively. Those are valid points, but I think we all know this is cocktail party patter, not rigorous academic research.

It’s because I find the question imprecise and unhelpful. What does “friendliest” even mean?

I’d like to suggest a “taxonomy of friendliness,” to help us all be more specific when we return from vacation and declare how wonderful the world is.

To tease out the elements of niceness, I asked the dreaded question one last time on Twitter last week, but insisted that people specify what made their country of choice so friendly. The answers flooded in: the Japanese will go out of their way to help visitors, Estonians are kindhearted people eager to share their rich history, Filipinos are always smiling and will help anyone no matter their own situation. There was more: the Lebanese are always happy to see tourists, the Irish have some of the best storytellers in the world, and you never know when a Georgian (as in the Republic of) will invite you to a feast.

So here, with the help of Twitter, input from colleagues and my own personal experiences, is an initial proposal – admittedly still unscientific — for Kingdoms within the domain of Friendliness, and what countries (and cities and regions) might be contenders for each crown.

Rainbow, a hippie-inspired, take-off-your-shoes-and-sit-on-the-floor spot.Credit Seth Kugel for The New York Times

Last summer, Korea started singing along to “Gangnam Style,” by the K-pop star Psy. By October, my nephews in Maryland had joined the chorus. A couple of months ago in Chongqing, China, I saw women exercising by doing its signature horse-riding dance in a public square. In February, Psy performed before thousands at Brazilian Carnival.

The thoroughly global hit (its video is currently YouTube’s most watched video ever, with over 1.3 billion views) has made Gangnam, a 15-square-mile district of southeast Seoul known for packed nightclubs, pricey boutiques and ubiquitous plastic surgery clinics, into a newly magnetic destination.

I normally avoid such spots — a matter of both budget and preference — but during a recent trip to South Korea, I couldn’t resist the challenge: Would it be possible to spend three days in a district defined by opulence without hyperextending my budget?

There are two phrases to learn if you visit Jeonju, a 650,000-person city – and a paradise for Korean food-lovers — three hours by bus south of Seoul.

First is “Hyundai-ok odi innayo?” — “Where is Hyundai-ok?” – a reference to a tiny restaurant famed for its kongnamul guk, or bean sprout soup, but nearly impossible to find in the labyrinthine bowels of Nambu Market.

The second is “Kamsa hamnida,” or “thank you,” the inevitable response to whichever generous soul drops what he’s doing and leads you to Hyundai-ok, past stalls of frozen fish and fresh fungi and down narrow passageways stacked with empty boxes and piles of dirty dishes.

My guide was a fish salesman, who deposited me at the restaurant, where I took the last of just 10 plastic stools. I was seated right in front of a woman in a pink apron slicing jalapeños, dicing chives and smashing garlic; other cooks filled big clay bowls with rice and the bean-sprout-laced broth or prepared banchan, the free and refillable miniature side dishes that accompany just about every Korean restaurant meal.

The soup is a famed hangover helper, but I had not been drinking, I had been freezing – Jeonju can be frigid in early February – and it transformed me from hungry and icy to satisfied and steamy for just 5,000 won (about $4.75 at 1050 won to the dollar).

There are now other Hyundai-ok franchises in Jeonju and elsewhere in Korea, but the original version is unique and representative of the city’s rich heritage. Jeonju is seen as a sort of guardian of Korean cultural, historical and, most of all, culinary traditions; last year it served as Unesco’s City of Gastronomy. It’s the place Koreans warn you not to go if you love Korean food, because you’ll never love it quite so much anywhere else again — or pay so little for it.

I spend my life looking for places like Jeonju, a city barely known to Western travelers that barely seems to care: many museums, restaurants and guesthouses don’t bother translating signs or menus, or even bother Romanizing their Korean names. (I heard much more Chinese than English among visitors.) The exception that proves the rule is Mosim, a cafe whose menu has headings for “Coffee,” “Tea” and the like but all listed items are in Korean Hangul script only. (I’ll have the, uh, latte?)